There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America's leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.

Which is to say that Apple's playing checkers while Google plays chess.

For better or worse, this is exactly why many people seem to hold Google in higher regard than they do Apple. Both Apple and Google are rich and wealthy beyond average-person-measure. Now, which company will be liked more: the one that uses said wealth to develop crazy may-or-may
-not-work technologies that can change the world at a massively substantial scale, or the one that stuffs $150 billion in shady bank accounts to avoid having to pay taxes?

The more wealth you hoard, the less sympathetic people will be towards you. Unless, of course, you use that wealth in a very public way.

Right. This is some very nice cherry picking done by Thom. While Apple continues to eliminate one or two reasons why I won't use iOS with every new release, Google hasn't done much but piss me off over the last few years. First, they killed reader. Then, they left Voice out to rot. And then removed all ad-blocking software from the Play store. And starting with Android 4.2, they haven't done a whole lot with Android, other than breaking things and removing features. And I read an article the other day that they're about to make it even harder to unlock bootloaders. Google Plus continues to get worse and worse with every release. What started out as a mainly nimble, text-oriented social networking app has turned into a clusterf**k that is more a photo editor than anything else. With their 'auto awesome' type bullshit, they're slowly but surely selling out to the iTards and making their ecosystem much less interesting to people like me.

Now, about the self-driving car thing:

Being visually impaired, trust me when I say that I want these self-driving cars more than anyone. That being said, as Steve Jobs once eloquently put it, real artists ship. Meaning, I will be impressed when they actually have something I can buy. Same with Google Glass. It's one thing to talk about all of this cool stuff you're working on, but it's quite another to put it in the hands of the masses.

But if they DO release a self-driving car that works, and that I can actually afford, I will take back every bad thing I ever said about them